Unlike most journalists covering Al Qaeda, Shaye risked his life to
travel to areas controlled by Al Qaeda and to interview its leaders. He
also conducted several interviews with the radical cleric Anwar al
Awlaki. Shaye did the last known interview with Awlaki just before it
was revealed that Awlaki, a US citizen, was on a CIA/JSOC hit list. “We
were only exposed to Western media and Arab media funded by the West,
which depicts only one image of Al Qaeda,” recalls his best friend Kamal
Sharaf, a well-known dissident Yemeni political cartoonist. “But
Abdulelah brought a different viewpoint.”